wubi or full install don't differ in terms of hardware support. though prior to installing linux full time, search google to confirm if your hardware works properly. there can be some issues with certain hardware, especially wireless cards and graphics too, but mostly everything should works fine. though some tinkering might be needed with the configs.

also, you'll get better support for your ubuntu related questions here:

ubuntuforums.org/

Yes Ubuntu is very stable and it does work well. But expect a learning curve. If you have a newer high speed machine, then consider installing VMware server and then Ubuntu inside it as a virtual machine.

I would suggest discarding the wubi way and going for a dual boot. Because linux needs a swap partition for proper working.

Also if it goes via wubi, it is sort of emulated and is not running the real linux way as it should. Means it is much slower than you would expect it to run as on a standalone partition. Linux has its own filesystem which is forced to run in an emulated environment under a Windows filesystem.

A good source of linux tutorials at least to get your way through...
lowfatlinux.com/

Ravi.

raviagrawal wrote:

If you have a newer high speed machine, then consider installing VMware server and then Ubuntu inside it as a virtual machine.

I suggest the same, i.e. using a virtual machine to get used to it first. I would suggest using Virtualbox as the virtualization software. It is FOSS, cross-platform, is developed actively, and has many features. I am currently using with two VMs, one is Ubuntu and the other is XP.

One major advantage of running it in VM is the snapshots feature of Virtualbox. If you take a snapshot, it saves the OS in its current state exactly. So if you want to try out something new which might screw the OS, take a snapshot first, and if something goes wrong, you can just go back to the previous snapshot, and everything will return like nothing happened.

I use Win 7 as my main OS and if I want to try a new software, I usually run it in the XP virtual machine first, because I want to keep my main OS's registry and file system clean. Installing and uninstalling can leave behind many unused registry entries.

raviagrawal wrote:

Because linux needs a swap partition for proper working.

Nope!! 12+years with fedora and I know this one fo sho

(I have used fedora installations without the swap partition. Things work just fine... in fact on faster machines, you wont even feel a difference)

ok pitamm, guess I was wrong....

u caught me here, but sure a swap partition does help a lot.



Ravi.

raviagrawal wrote:

ok pitamm, guess I was wrong.... u caught me here, but sure a swap partition does help a lot. Ravi.

Actually it doesn't even help much on latest machines with sufficient ram.

my 2 GB swap never gets used, even though i have only 1 GB ram. in fact my ram usage never exceeds 300-400 MB on my arch machine (this too with firefox open + gnome + screen etc).

swap does help with older machines though, but it usually slows the system down as it is never as fast as actual ram.

Whenever a new windows user were confronted about the installation of Linux partition, I suggest them a single partiion (/) leaving out detail abut swap. Because they already have the partition made by the windows installer c,d,e,f all equal partitioned..it simplified the matter, so far I didn't receive complaint of any performance hit from them..

Even for systems that don't *need* the extra memory space, swap can
actually provide performance improvements by allowing unused memory
to be replaced with often-used memory.

Well it is the default and magical property of swap space, because extra RAM
doesn't allow you to replace unused memory with often used memory.

The theory holds true no matter how much RAM you have. Swap can
improve performance.

Regards